Books Never having been a fan of the pirate genre I entered communication with Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, one of its pillars, with some trepidation especially since as the author’s biographer Claire Harmon notes like his Jekyl and Hyde, it’s so well known that it hardly requires being read at all, “Long John Silver is more real to most people than any historical buccaneer.” I’d like to offer a narrative of rediscovering the genre, but young Jim Hawkins is such a greedy, repellent narrator and the various pirates so difficult to understand and the story points so subtly telegraphed, I was less thrilled than appalled. That Silver and Gunn are the most entertaining figures it does go without saying, but as Harmon hints because their old bones have been resurrected so many times since, the original now seems prosaic and slothful. But such things are not Stevenson’s fault, of course.